Well, in a scant few hours I'll be off to Austin, Texas, for KaizenConf. It will be a fun packed couple of day dealing with some very interesting topics. In all honestly, I don't exactly know which of the topics I want to attend - the pretty much all are of interest to me. Makes me wish I could clone myself. My plane lands early afternoon, so if you're kicking around Austin and want to entertain an easily amused Canuck, give me a holler (comments here, or on twitter).

Lately I've been experimenting with TypeMock Isolator,  and it's new AAA syntax.  For the past two years I've been a diehard Rhino.Mocks kind of guy, but figured that it's time to check out other tools.  Anyway, I had a situation where a unit test of mine was failing when I ran it with TestDriven.NET, but would pass when I ran it using the unit test runner in Resharper 4.1. Usually when I develop, I write individual tests and then run individually with TestDriven.

Lately I've been experimenting with TypeMock Isolator,  and it's new AAA syntax.  For the past two years I've been a diehard Rhino.Mocks kind of guy, but figured that it's time to check out other tools.  Anyway, I had a situation where a unit test of mine was failing when I ran it with TestDriven.NET, but would pass when I ran it using the unit test runner in Resharper 4.1. Usually when I develop, I write individual tests and then run individually with TestDriven.

Most who know me are aware that, despite being a .NET developer and a Microsoft MVP, I'm a bit of a Linux freak at heart.  I actually prefer Linux to Windows.  Linux has come a long way in the past 18 years, although I've only been tinkering with it off and on for the past 9 years or so.  I will admit that perhaps Linux on the desktop isn't quite there for the average consumer, but for me it.

Today was my last full time day on this contract.  Tomorrow I start up full-time with another.  Personally, I've gotten in the habit of looking a my past contract and conducting my own personal retrospective on what I learned or how I would do things differently.  I figured that because my memory is getting worse in my old age, I'd started putting these things down on my blog. For a greenfield project, don't use the database someone hands off to you

As I was driving home today, I couldn't help notice something.  Microsoft's ASP.NET MVC framework is still in beta, and was only announced last October.  To my knowledge, there are currently three projects in the Edmonton area based off this framework. Castle Monorail has been around for much longer, three years or so?  It's still listed as a release candidate on it's website, but I'd say Monorail is suitable for production.

Note:  I originally wrote this post on August 23, 2008.  As things change with the book NHibernate in Action, I will be updating this post and resetting the date.  I'd like to take a break from boring you two readers of my blog about my experience with Linux and VMware, and take a moment to annoy you with a rant.  Diversity is the spice of life after all. This little remonstration of mine is about the Manning Early Access Program (MEAP).

Well, I don't know why it's taken me so long to get to get around to this: but I must say that there are now a couple of "must haves" in my web developer's tool box.  One of them is jQuery, and now the other is QUnit. Chad Myers has a good, quick, post introducing QUnit, I'd strongly suggest checking it out if you do web development (which, IMHO, implies some use of JavaScript, right?

At the last Edmonton Agile Methods User Group meeting, we had a brief discussion around code coverage, and what should be an acceptable number to shoot for.  Is it okay when the unit tests cover 80% of the code?  Or should 100% be the only acceptable value?  After all, how can you be confident in your code knowing that 20% of it isn't tested. Allow me to go out on a limb here, and state with absolute certainty that the correct answer is "It depends on your situation".

Last night (Thursday, June 26th) Rod Paddock gave a talk on using Silverlight 2.0 to the Edmonton .NET User Group.  I'd say that Rod did a pretty good job, despite the fact that the beta of both Silverlight and Expression Blend didn't exactly want to play nice all the time.  It's definitely perked my interest in the technology, and I can see a lot of business potential for it. The rich user experience that Silverlight brings to the web-browser, will, I think raise the bar for what web applications will do for businesses.